Recent Comments

Epstein was a great kickoff man, a good punter, and had a strong leg, but he was only ever okay for accuracy. He was only 26-for-42 on his career, with 3 missed extra points. And never forget the 2000 game at UCLA, the 23-20 loss, in which he missed a 46-yarder, a 24-yarder with 3 minutes left, and an extra point.

I am not at all confident that the vacated records will stick upon ND's appeal. ND's initial response to the sanction actually sounded pretty good to me, better than similar statements by other schools in other situations... (1) this was a situation of a student on the very fringe of the school's football officialdom helping out players in a few isolated incidents, and once officialdom found out about it they shut it down and did everything right to report, cooperate, etc.; and (2) according to ND at least, there's no precedent for vacated record in that kind of situation.

If (2) is indeed true, I'd bet vacating of wins doesn't stick. This wasn't like OSU systematically turning a blind eye to tattoo-gate and then Tressel trying to cover it up.

In the lead-up to ND's game against Duke earlier in the year, I wrote a diary (link) about the historical race between U-M and ND for all-time wins and winning percentage. I'd hate to see that historical relationship now made moot for something like this; I'd much prefer to see U-M now maintain and widen its advantage through domination on the field.

Yeah, I definitely thought about this, and didn't spend enough time thinking about it to come up with something good. The question should probably be something like, "At what point are you ahead by more than one score with an unreasonable amount of time on the clock for the opponent to be able to come back to beat you?" But it's tough to determine just how subjective one should be; second- and third-string players come into play, as well as momentum and morale.

For instance, in weeding out the garbage-time scores... take a look at this year's MSU game. Michigan went into bleed-the-clock mode early-ish in the fourth quarter, up by 20 points. The game was, for all intents and purposes, over. MSU scored with 7:31 remaining to close the gap to 13 points, 30-17. In the flow of the game at that point, this was probably a "garbage-time" score, given also the quality of the teams. It wasn't a meaningless score, however; MSU was only down 13 points with half of the fourth quarter left. Teams have come back from farther behind with less time on the clock than that. However, I did consider the touchdown with 0:01 left on the clock to be a garbage-time score, because that score truly was meaningless.

(Actually because of the final go-for-two debacle, this year's MSU game didn't play into the adjustment to the calculation for garbage-time points, because Michigan beat 17 points at the same time it beat 23 points... when Michigan's total hit 24 with 0:39 left in the second quarter.)

The Paul Bunyan trophy has never been exchanged on the field/sideline (at least not in the past several decades). It's always been done out of sight in the locker rooms. Between statue, base, and wooden stand, it's huge.

What makes it even more amazing is that most of Michigan's non-conference games in the Point-a-Minute era were less than the regulation 70 minutes (two 35-minute halves). The teams would agree before the game to play 20- or 25-minute halves, etc., and the losing team would often concede at some point in the second half (as Stanford did in the first Rose Bowl). What allowed Michigan to run up such high scores in many shortened games was the kickoff strategy back then... the team that was scored upon had the option to either kickoff or receive. In that era with games often massively turning on a turnover or penalty, teams usually chose to kickoff back to their opponent who had just scored, to try to keep the ball out of their own end. Michigan spent huge chunks of those games on offense.

Interesting that none of those are close games at all, and most feature goose eggs, whereas if you'd expanded your criteria by one more point to include games in which Michigan scored 69, there'd be a 69-67 game up there.

(Also, to review the history of the winning percentage and wins races, I went season-by-season for each school, adding up the cumulative record per each school's official season record history... in each case, the totals added up to each school's published official all-time record, as one would expect.)

Yes, I mentioned several "other" songs of schools ("Eyes of Texas" is one of these). Although several are great ("Buckeye Battle Cry" and "Hike, Notre Dame" in particular could've made the top ten list), I restricted my rankings to the schools' "official" primary fight songs.

Clemson's version of "Tiger Rag" is far and away the best; I don't think it's close. It didn't really qualify as one of the top ten in my book because the song was initially a popular song... not written as a fight song. And so many schools use it in some way.

Navy's official fight song, "Anchors Aweigh," is great, but I really consider it more of a military march than a fight song. Although it was written partly to be an athletics song, it has no lyrics regarding athletics, winning the game, etc.; it's just a naval song. A great one, but not really a fight song. To me it's just a tad slow to really be a crowd rouser.

Air Force uses "The U.S. Air Force" (Off we go into the wild blue yonder...) as a fight song, but it's not the academy's official fight song. The official song, "Falcon Fight Song," is not bad at all. Not top-ten worthy, though.

I absolutely agree with you on the richness of sound in Victors vs. Victory March, but pure musicality isn't going to be the only criterion for just about anybody putting together a list like this. And yes, there's not much science behind it... mostly personal preference.

The mock committee was torn between Wisconsin and Syracuse for the last 1-seed. They gave it to Syracuse based on fewer losses (the mock committee really didn't like Wisconsin's horrible January run). That made Wisconsin the overall #5, the highest ranked 2-seed. Michigan IIRC was the last 2-seed, overall #8. So Wisconsin got placed in its nearest regional before Michigan did.